Translating Geek Into English
I StumbledUpon a notable Ajax resource recently, called Ajaxload. This site provides tools for generating an animated GIF that can be used on your site to indicate that something is loading or happening or whatever. Choose a style you like, the background color, the foreground color, and the transparency of the background, then click “Generate it!” and you have a nice, custom graphic. The site’s in beta now and is free; I’m not sure if it’ll remain so or not (hopefully it will).
I came across a product called Alkaline the other day, put out by Litmus. Alkaline is a Mac application that allows you to test a Web site on up to 17 different Windows browsers. It’s much like a Windows-specific version of BrowserShots, but guaranteed to always return quick results and with a few bonus features such as plug-ins that work with common text editors and IDE’s like TextMate or Coda. For more, check out this screencast. You should also check out BrowserShots, if you haven’t already. For the occassional browser test, BrowserShots is fantastic. For more frequent and reliable Windows tests, you may find that Alkaline is worth the money (they have a free version, a day pass, or different subscription rates).
Litmus also makes an application for testing how a newsletter will look in different email clients.
I stumbled upon this Web site called the Open Source Alternative. The entire point of the site is to identify open source alternatives to common commercial (or just not open source) applications. For example, if you need something like Visio, but don’t want to give Microsoft any more money, you can check out Dia. The osalt.com site is pretty simple, well organized, and easy to navigate. It includes descriptions of the various software, including the operating systems they run on and user reviews. As a person that prefers using open source software whenever possible, it’s nice to have a resource like this available when my next need arises.
In 2008, Sun purchased MySQL for a reported $1 billion (US) and Sun has since been purchased by Oracle. Monty Widenius, the original creator of MySQL, has since left Sun, apparently over philosophical differences. In particular there seems to be a difference of opinion when it comes to the appropriateness of the 5.1 release of MySQL (i.e., was it too buggy for public release). Widenius is now working on MariaDB, an offshoot of MySQL that uses the Maria storage engine (aka table type) by default. This is definitely a project to keep an eye on, as MySQL users will logically move to MariaDB if they do find MySQL to be increasingly unstable or they just disagree with how Sun/Oracle is managing the product. As with many things, the popularity of MariaDB will partially depend upon the adoption rates by hosting companies. Or, for those that do stick with MySQL, version 6 will include support for the Maria storage engine. See this page for more on MariaDB compared with MySQL.
…JetBrains just released version 1 of a new Ruby and Ruby on Rails IDE called RubyMine. It features everything you’d expect in an IDE, like code completion, project navigation, HTML/CSS/JS editing, version control software (VCS) support, plus lots of Ruby and Rails-specific features. Version 1.1 of RubyMine is expected in May, with support for version 2.3 of Rails (a significant upgrade). The software is available under two licenses, one (free) for open-source projects and another commercial license ($99 US at the time of this writing).
In this edition…
This newsletter is a bit different in that there are only a couple of things, with a lot of text given to my recent experience with some PHP frameworks. As always, thanks for reading and please do let me know what comments and questions you have!
My on-going series on jQuery has finally been completed online. There are seven posts in the series, from the basics of jQuery to selecting elements to effects to plug-ins to Ajax, etc. The first one can be found at http://blog.dmcinsights.com/2009/02/05/a-quick-intro-to-jquery/. You can find them all here: http://blog.dmcinsights.com/tag/jquery/. If you haven’t played with it yet or checked out some of the examples you can find online, jQuery is a wonderful JavaScript framework, well worth anyone’s consideration.
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